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A glimpse of self-actualization
Oct. 22nd, 2004 12:29 pmI'm still struggling with procrastination.
This morning my boss called me to say that one of my other clients was looking for an update on work that I was supposed to finish on Tuesday. I immediately launched into the list of tasks and had almost all of them finished in about an hour, enough that I could call the client and make him happy.
The disgusting thing is that I put off an hour of work for over two days. Granted, I was working on another client's project, but surely I could have spared that time and made this other client happy too.
On the plus side, looking back on that hour, I'm really amazed at what I accomplished. I'm getting pretty good at this stuff. I added two new database fields to my local database, the remote database and the offline order archive that the client stores in FileMaker Pro. I figured out the form generation routines that Megan had created and tweaked the forms to include the new fields I added. I added the new fields to the routines that write the orders into the database tables and uploaded all of these changes to the remote server. Then I updated the export routines to include the new fields and made sure they were imported properly into the FileMaker archive. Finally, I documented the procedure for downloading the order information and importing it into the archive and sent that to the client along with the archive file.
Then I spent about another hour holding the client's hand as he tried to follow my instructions and making notes on still more changes he needs to see. He's not very comfortable with computers -- at least, not as I measure such things -- and it took a lot of patience to help him through everything.
I wish I could motivate myself to work at optimum level all the time. I really need to find ways to do that.
This morning my boss called me to say that one of my other clients was looking for an update on work that I was supposed to finish on Tuesday. I immediately launched into the list of tasks and had almost all of them finished in about an hour, enough that I could call the client and make him happy.
The disgusting thing is that I put off an hour of work for over two days. Granted, I was working on another client's project, but surely I could have spared that time and made this other client happy too.
On the plus side, looking back on that hour, I'm really amazed at what I accomplished. I'm getting pretty good at this stuff. I added two new database fields to my local database, the remote database and the offline order archive that the client stores in FileMaker Pro. I figured out the form generation routines that Megan had created and tweaked the forms to include the new fields I added. I added the new fields to the routines that write the orders into the database tables and uploaded all of these changes to the remote server. Then I updated the export routines to include the new fields and made sure they were imported properly into the FileMaker archive. Finally, I documented the procedure for downloading the order information and importing it into the archive and sent that to the client along with the archive file.
Then I spent about another hour holding the client's hand as he tried to follow my instructions and making notes on still more changes he needs to see. He's not very comfortable with computers -- at least, not as I measure such things -- and it took a lot of patience to help him through everything.
I wish I could motivate myself to work at optimum level all the time. I really need to find ways to do that.
